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INNOVATION
Accelerated aging assay for quantifying the long-term stability of DNA origami nanostructures
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Market Maturity: Exploring
These are innovations that are actively exploring value creation opportunities. Learn more
Market Creation Potential
This innovation was assessed by the JRC’s Market Creation Potential indicator framework as having a Noteworthy” level of Market Creation Potential. Only innovations that are showing multiple signals of market creation potential are assigned a value under this indicator system. Learn more
Women-led innovation
A woman had a leadership role in developing this innovation in at least one of the Key Innovator organisations listed below.
Go to Market needs
Needs that, if addressed, can increase the chances this innovation gets to (or closer to) the market incude:
  • Prepare for Market entry
  • Scale-up market opportunities
Location of Key Innovators developing this innovation
Key Innovators
UN Sustainable Development Goals(SDG)
This innovation contributes to the following SDG(s)
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 9
Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

The UN explains: "Investments in infrastructure – transport, irrigation, energy and information and communication technology – are crucial to achieving sustainable development and empowering communities in many countries. It has long been recognized that growth in productivity and incomes, and improvements in health and education outcomes require investment in infrastructure."

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 12
Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns

The UN explains: "Sustainable consumption and production is about promoting resource and energy efficiency, sustainable infrastructure, and providing access to basic services, green and decent jobs and a better quality of life for all. Its implementation helps to achieve overall development plans, reduce future economic, environmental and social costs, strengthen economic competitiveness and reduce poverty.

The EU-funded Research Project
This innovation was developed under the Horizon Europe project NEO with an end date of 30/09/2026
  • Read more about this project on CORDIS
Description of Project NEO
Current long-term archival media (such as tape and disk) have several issues, the most important one being that they are short lived (up to 5-10 years) forcing data to be copied between storage media every few years in a costly process which also produces considerable electronic waste. Longer-lasting media are desperately needed and DNA oligos have been identified as a major contender to be the next archival storage medium. With it, data is written using DNA synthesis and read using DNA sequencing. DNA is particularly promising as a storage medium, due to its durability as it can last for several hundreds of years. However, storing data in DNA oligos is currently too expensive due to the exorbitant cost of DNA synthesis (~0.12USD to write one bit) as well as issues such as speed in writing (synthesis) and reading (sequencing). For this reason, we propose to investigate storing data in DNA nanostructures. Our approach is based on producing DNA nanostructures, like a breadboard, and attaching streptavidin at a given set of locations, to either write a one if streptavidin is present or a zero otherwise. The major benefit of our approach is that all possible nanostructures can be built out of a predefined, small set of DNA oligos which can be produced cheaply and en-masse. Writing is therefore substantially cheaper. With our approach, writing, reading (based on atomic force microscopy), and editing are also substantially faster. Editing information is currently infeasible with DNA storage based on oligos. We have successfully demonstrated the feasibility of both writing and reading in proof-of-concept experiments, giving confidence in the approach. The goal of this proposal is to scale up the basic but successfully tested idea to make this a feasible approach at a larger scale. The team proposing this work is ideally placed to make the research a success. The team brings all the necessary expertise together.

Innnovation Radar's analysis of this innovation is based on data collected on 03/12/2024.
The unique id of this innovation in the European Commission's IT systems is: 131549